In today's business climate, industry fortunes rise and fall on whether information is exchanged in an efficient manner. Cell phones, pagers, and the Internet have thrived because each technology allows businesses to exchange critical market information at a moment's notice. In addition, such technologies allow individuals to keep abreast of recent developments with family and friends. In short, many segments of our modern society require instant access to accurate, up-to-the-minute information.
Companies spend significant resources to develop modern communication systems that provide people with such information. As networked communication systems have matured, data rates have increased from 20 kilobits per second (kb/s) in 1975, to 100 Mb/s with modern VDSL. In other words, customers in today's “information age” can receive data approximately 5,000 times as fast as network customers of thirty years ago. To bring customers into this modern “information age”, developers have spent billions of dollars to develop network technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, for example. To continue to increase data rates at such a remarkable pace, communication systems developers will likely be required to spend significant capital resources for many years to come.
The data rate at which data is successfully transferred over a communication system generally decreases as the noise increases. Thus, communication systems strive to minimize the effects of various types of noise, such as continuous noise, impulse noise, or combinations thereof. For example, continuous noise (stationary noise) can have randomly distributed values of noise over time, whereas impulse noise (non-stationary noise) generally comprises short bursts of relatively high levels of noise that affect a relatively narrow frequency. In any event, communication systems employ various mechanisms or techniques to combat continuous and impulse noise and/or to correct noise-related data transfer errors.
While the existing methods and systems for combating noise and for correcting noise-related data transfer errors are sufficient for their stated purpose, the methods and systems are not sufficient to accurately account for changes in impulse noise during communication service. Thus, improved methods and systems are needed.